Sacraments of Fire

by David R. George III

  “But what sort of problems are they anticipating if they let him go home?” Ro asked, genuinely perplexed. “It can’t only be that they’re sensitive to the Bajoran participation—both perceived and real—in the assassination and the ensuing crisis.”

  “That is a significant part of their concern,” Pralon said. “The initial belief that the first minister’s chief of staff killed President Bacco stirred up an old drumbeat among Cardassian anti-Bajoran extremists, and when it turned out to be a conspiracy perpetrated by Baras, they only screamed louder.”

  “But the True Way was part of the conspiracy,” Ro argued. “If Cardassians are going to vilify all of Bajor for the actions of one man, they also have to blame all of Cardassia for the actions of that terrorist organization.”

  “I’m afraid you’re making logical arguments, Captain,” Pralon said, standing up from her chair. “Believe me, reason doesn’t apply when we’re dealing with extremists.” As the kai walked across the compartment, Ro wondered if she’d meant her last statement to include the Ohalavaru radicals. When Pralon reached the table in the dining area, she opened the ­carryall sitting there, which one of her assistants had brought from the transport. She reached in and pulled out a dark, oblong bottle. “I brought a Sahving Valley port, and I’m going to pour myself a glass,” the kai said. “Would you like one?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Ro said. As Pralon ordered a pair of wineglasses from the replicator, the captain walked over to join her.

  “You’re right, Captain,” the kai said. She set the glasses down on the table and picked up the bottle. “The Bajoran government isn’t only concerned about the potential political fallout of allowing or forbidding Doctor Altek to come to Bajor. They’re also worried about the real problems he could bring with him.” Pralon poured the deep-red liquid into the two glasses, then handed one to Ro. The rich aroma of the fortified wine drifted to the captain at once.

  “What real problems?” Ro asked.

  Pralon sipped at the port, and the captain followed her lead. The slightly sweet wine had notes of dark fruit and old wood. Rather than returning to the living area, the kai sat down at the dining table. Ro did so as well.

  “The last time a Bajoran emerged from the Celestial Temple hundreds of years after his own time, it was Akorem Laan,” Pralon said, invoking the name of the famous poet. “When Akorem appeared, he assumed the mantle of Emissary of the Prophets, with Benjamin Sisko stepping aside for him. That resulted in tremendous confusion and distress among the Bajoran people. Akorem also caused additional turmoil by trying to reinstitute the D’jarras.” The strict caste system that specified a family’s profession had fallen into disuse during the Occupation. Akorem’s attempt to reestablish the D’jarras had been unpopular and divisive, and had his efforts proven successful, Bajor would have been disqualified from membership in the Federation.

  “Doctor Altek is not Akorem Laan,” Ro said. “I’ve spoken at length with him about his wanting to go back to Bajor. It’s a natural and completely understandable desire. Until he arrived here, he’d spent his entire life on the planet. He has no intention of claiming to be anything other than a citizen of Bajor, and he certainly has no interest in promoting a return to backward social practices.”

  “I’m prepared to believe that, Captain,” Pralon said. “The problem is that there will be those who would use Doctor Altek’s presence to forward their own agendas. With Benjamin Sisko no longer functioning as the Emissary, and no longer living on Bajor or stationed on Deep Space Nine, the Vedek Assembly has been fearful of some usurper trying to seize the position that he has forsaken. Even if Doctor Altek does not do so, it is possible that others might claim the title in his name, and then rally against any attempts to deny him.”

  “Begging your pardon, Your Eminence, but that is a great deal of speculation.”

  “Perhaps, but given that we’ve been seeing more religious dissent than ever before in modern times, it’s not unrealistic speculation,” Pralon said. “Under different circumstances, I would have waited to travel here until I had waded through the politics of it all, to put minds at ease with respect to Doctor Altek returning to Bajor, but these are not normal circumstances.”

  “Are you referring to the Ohalavaru extremists?”

  “Yes.” Pralon brought her glass up to her lips, paused, then set it back down on the table without drinking. “I came here now because after I leave here, I will not be able to return anytime soon. My presence on Bajor will be required for the foreseeable future.”

  “Why?” Ro asked, although she thought she knew the answer.

  “Because when I return to Bajor,” the kai said, “I will be making a public announcement about the discovery on Endalla.”

  “How does the Vedek Assembly feel about that?”

  “They are divided,” Pralon said. “There are many—and I include myself in this group—who feel that we should not be afraid of the truth, even if that truth challenges our beliefs. But there are those who point to the publication of Ohalu’s writings and the consequences that followed, including the standoff and loss of life on Endalla six years ago, and the abduction of Rebecca Sisko after that.”

  “And now the discovery of the falsework,” Ro said.

  “Yes,” said the kai. “Even if the Ohalavaru interpretation of the discovery is incorrect, many vedeks are concerned that it will confuse people and raise doubts in their minds about the Prophets.”

  “They may be right,” Ro said, thinking of the anguished reaction of the devout Cenn Desca.

  “They are right,” Pralon said. “No matter whether the Ohalavaru are correct or not, the existence of the falsework will cause tremors in Bajoran religious life.”

  “And yet you’re going to make the announcement anyway,” Ro said. “I admire your courage.”

  Pralon shook her head. “There’s nothing courageous about it, Captain,” she said. “It is an act of self-preservation. If I lied about facts to the Bajoran faithful, how could I consider myself their leader?”

  “What if you’re left with nobody to lead?”

  “I don’t think that will be the case,” Pralon said. “In any event, I can always keep my own counsel.”

  “Does that mean that your faith hasn’t been challenged by the Ohalavaru discovery?”

  Pralon looked the captain in the eye and held her gaze for a long time. Ro waited as the silence extended. Eventually, the kai raised her glass and finished the last of her port.

  She never answered the question.

  28

  Kira Nerys prepared to die.

  She sat on the bridge of Even Odds, close enough to where Facity Sleedow crewed the helm that she could monitor the ship’s approach to the wormhole. Kira believed that events would soon begin to move very fast, though she still couldn’t be certain. She had spent the previous two and a half months trying to determine what she would do—what she should do—when Even Odds finally reached the Idran system.

  Kira recalled well the fleet of ships that had emerged from the wormhole years earlier—reckoning by the timeline of her life—and had set course directly for Bajor, led by the crazed Iliana Ghemor. She also remembered Even Odds charging after the Ascendants, and Taran’atar’s last, desperate act, which had changed everything. Back then, she had been a Starfleet captain and the commanding officer of Deep Space 9, but what she hadn’t known then—and what she had only recently come to realize—was that a future version of herself had been aboard Even Odds at the time of its destruction.

  And if I don’t do anything to change that, Kira thought, it means that I’m going to die.

  When Kira had first realized that her journey out of the wormhole had taken her backward in time, she’d thought about what she could do to save Taran’atar and the thousands of others who had been lost when the Ascendants had attacked. Since then, she had agonized over the Temporal Prime Directiv
e and the dangers of altering the timeline, but she also puzzled over what the Prophets intended her to do. They had called her Their Hand, and They had set her upon her current path. Had They done that so that she could take action to prevent the loss of all those lives, or for some other purpose?

  Kira had been over it again and again, but she’d always come back to the same conclusion. If the crew of Even Odds had not retrieved the Orb carrying her, they would not have headed for the wormhole in order to bring her home—which meant that they and Taran’atar would not be at Bajor when the Ascendants attacked. In that case, deaths would likely have been counted, not in thousands, but in millions, and maybe even in billions. Clearly, the Prophets intended for her to redirect Even Odds to where it needed to be to save Bajor.

  For a while, Kira had hoped that the ship would arrive at the wormhole before the Ascendants did, but then that again posed thorny questions about her taking actions that would ultimately disrupt the timeline—not to mention the potential dilemma if her past self met her future self. As Even Odds carried her toward Bajor, though, it became apparent that it would reach it at the same time as the Ascendants originally had. If she continued on that course, it seemed that events would unfold just as they had before, which made a cold sort of sense to her. According to Benjamin, the Prophets existed nonlinearly in time, so from Their perspective, dispatching Kira from the Celestial Temple into the past, and into the course of Taran’atar and Even Odds, must have been what had already happened.

  This is the path that the Prophets have laid out for me, she thought. Not just for myself, but as Their Hand. During the Occupation, Kira had become inured to the possibility of her own death. There had been many instances during her years in the Resistance, and even during her tenure on DS9, when she’d believed she would not survive to see another day. Those had been violent times—times she thought she’d left behind, particularly after resigning her captaincy and becoming an acolyte in the Bajoran religion.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought. She would do what she must, in the service of her gods and to save her people. If that led to her death, she could not think of a better end to her personal story.

  Kira had considered telling the crew of Even Odds—or at least Dez—about her traveling back in time and about what lay ahead, but she couldn’t be sure that they would agree to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. She also thought about informing Taran’atar, who she believed would remain loyal to her no matter the battle she urged him to fight, but she again worried about disrupting the timeline. In the end, she kept all of it to herself, believing that the Prophets had not set her on a path only for her to fail.

  “We’re entering the Idran system,” announced Sleedow. “Dropping to sublight speed.” The deep drone of the warp engines eased as the impulse drive took over.

  Dez looked over at her from where he sat in the command chair. On the viewscreen, the rush of stars had settled into a static tableau. “Set course for the Anomaly,” he said, using the name that Gamma Quadrant residents employed for the Bajoran wormhole. Only two other crew members were present: Pri’ak, the squat Merdosian engineer with transparent teeth, and Pifko Gaber, the gregarious, four-legged Aarruri.

  Actually, there’s another member of the crew here, Kira reminded herself. Taran’atar worked the sensor console. Even after spending more than two months aboard and watching him function essentially as the ship’s security chief and tactical officer, she had difficulty thinking of him as a part of the Even Odds crew. Maybe because I know that it’s not going to last.

  “Sensors detect a large number of vessels near the fourth planet,” the Jem’Hadar announced.

  Kira’s heart began to race. It’s beginning.

  “Are they Federation ships?” Sleedow asked. “Maybe we can hand off Captain Kira and finally get back to our own lives.”

  “Negative,” Taran’atar said. “They are Ascendant vessels.”

  “Ascendant?!” Dez said, his voice rising as he leaped from his chair. “Facity, get us out of here.” Sleedow had begun working the helm even before he’d given the order.

  Kira saw the field of stars on the viewscreen shift as Even Odds altered course. “No!” she said. “I have to get to Bajor!” The heavy thrum of the warp drive rose around them, underscoring the desperation Kira felt.

  “We’ll bring you back another time,” Dez said.

  “If there’s anything left to bring you back to,” Sleedow muttered, not quite under her breath. On the other side of the bridge, Pif raced back and forth, barking that he thought the Ascendants were nothing more than a myth, a scary story parents told their litters to make them behave.

  Kira bolted up from her chair and leaned in over the helm console. She opened her mouth to tell the first officer to turn Even Odds back around, thinking that she might have to incapacitate Sleedow and take control of the ship herself. Before she could say anything, though, a hum rose on the bridge. Startled, Kira backed up a step and watched as the first officer vanished in the brilliant wash of a transporter beam. When she looked around, she saw that Dez, Pif, and Pri’ak had also disappeared.

  Only Taran’atar remained.

  “If you will take the helm, Captain,” the Jem’Hadar said, “we can take you home.”

  Kira threw herself into the seat occupied a moment ago by Facity Sleedow. “Bringing us about,” she said as she turned Even Odds back toward the Idran system. “What did you do with the crew?”

  “I transported all of them into Four Bay,” Taran’atar said. “All but Srral, who I beamed into a portable sensor array.” Kira had been shown the array at some point during her time aboard, and she knew that it functioned completely independently of the ship’s systems.

  “Where are the Ascendant vessels?” Kira wanted to know as she set course back into the Idran system. Maybe if I can reach the Ascendants before they enter the wormhole, I can stop them from reaching Bajor.

  “They are keeping station not far from the Anomaly,” Taran’atar said. “No . . . there is also a squadron of ten ships headed for the fourth planet.”

  No! Kira thought. Am I too late? She knew that a small contingent of Ascendant vessels had attacked Idran IV, partly because the incident had resulted in a period of isolationism enforced by the Eav’oq, but primarily because, at the time of the assault, Kai Pralon had been visiting their lone city—called Terev’oqu—as part of a cultural exchange. Kira hadn’t factored that into her plan to bring Even Odds and Taran’atar to where they needed to be to face the Ascendants because she knew that the kai and the Eav’oq had endured the attack.

  But how did they do that? Kira asked herself. At the time, an Eav’oq named Itu—who refused to portray himself as the leader of his people, despite serving in the de facto position—had been on Bajor. After surviving the arrival of the Ascendants there, he had learned of the zealots’ offensive on Idran IV. Itu immediately traveled back through the wormhole to rejoin his people. While he later sent word to Bajor that the Eav’oq would close the borders of their world at least in the near term, he never offered an explanation as to how his people had withstood the Ascendant onslaught. They had virtually no armaments and no defenses. When the Ascendants had attacked them millennia ago, the Eav’oq had faced the threat by flight and concealment. The kai, when she returned to Bajor, had been able to offer up few details about the Ascendants’ barrage, and nothing at all about how Terev’oqu had stood against it. Kira only knew that subsequent scans of Idran IV had revealed destruction on the outskirts of the city, but no wreckage of Ascendant ships, meaning that their squadron had somehow been repelled, not destroyed.

  Suddenly, Kira understood why Kai Pralon had said so little about the events on Idran IV. She was protecting me—protecting the integrity of the timeline. It made sense to Kira. She must have been the one to save the Eav’oq and the kai. But how—

  “Taran’atar, Kai Pralon is on the fourth plane
t,” she said. “I have to protect her and the Eav’oq from that squadron. The city has no weapons or defenses.”

  “We can take the Even Odds into the atmosphere,” Taran’atar said. “The ship has only limited weaponry, but it has advanced shields, is extremely maneuverable, and is larger than the single-passenger vessels headed for the planet.”

  “With the shields up, we won’t be able to transport the kai safely off the planet,” Kira said.

  “Take the dropship,” Taran’atar said. “You can beam up the kai while I defend against the Ascendants’ attack.”

  This is what happened, Kira thought. I saved Kai Pralon, but she never said anything in order to protect the timeline. It all felt right to Kira, and at that moment, the only thing she had to go on was instinct. Instinct . . . and faith.

  “Transport me to the dropship,” she told Taran’atar. “Once I’ve rescued the kai, beam us back aboard.”

  Taran’atar turned back to his console and began working his controls, then looked back at her one final time. “Victory is life,” he said.

  An instant later, Kira heard the hum of the transporter beam, and then the Even Odds disappeared around her.

  29

  Odo paced alongside the massive storage compartment, peering in through port after port at the great amorphous form. As best he or anybody could tell, it remained in precisely the same shape as when it had first been collected from the Capricorn Arday system. Sensors detected no movement, either i­nternal or external, no changes in mass or temperature. It looked the same. In the five days Odo had spent at Newton Outpost, he had done nothing to help the potential shape-shifter.

  How can I expect to help it if I don’t even know if it’s alive?

  For his first full day at the facility, Odo had met with all of the scientists who had studied the specimen. Some provided only analytical data taken from various types of scans, while others had supplied information about their attempts either to communicate with it or evoke a response from it. It pleased Odo that they had all erred on the side of caution, taking only those actions that seemed unlikely to cause a shape-shifter discomfort. Nothing worked.